The ‘new’ Clinton emails might all be duplicates

The FBI hasn’t looked at them yet

Hours after FBI Director James Comey sent a bombshell letter to several Republican congressional committee chairs, informing them that the FBI has “has learned of the existence of emails” that may be “pertinent” to its previous investigation into Secretary Hillary Clinton, the nature of these emails is even more opaque than it was immediately after the story broke. At the same time, Comey’s decision to send this letter just eleven days before a presidential election is increasingly under fire from Democrats and from former Justice Department officials.

The bulk of the new emails were reportedly discovered on a laptop owned by Clinton aide Huma Abedin on a laptop used by both Abedin and her estranged husband, former Rep. Anthony Weiner (D-NY). Weiner is currently the subject of an unrelated investigation. Yet, according to the Wall Street Journal, the FBI has not even “determined if the work emails in question are copies of messages already reviewed by the FBI.”

Indeed, as NBC’s Pete Williams reported Friday evening, “it’s very possible that many of these if not all of them are duplicates with the ones they have already seen from examining the e-mails that Hillary Clinton turned over to the State Department.” People at the FBI, Williams also noted, “don’t have any idea what’s in these e-mails yet.”

These new revelations — that the FBI knows little, if anything about the emails at the heart of the political bomb Comey dropped less than two weeks before an election — come after earlier reporting revealed that the emails are “not to or from Clinton.”

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So, to be clear, the FBI Director delivered a gut punch to the Clinton campaign, despite the fact that 1) he doesn’t know what he has; 2) it may be something that he already had; and, 3) whatever it is that he has, it reportedly didn’t come from Secretary Clinton, and was not sent to her.

The Clinton campaign, for its part, insists that the FBI must be more forthcoming now that it has introduced this cryptic story into the final days of the campaign. “The Director owes it to the American people to immediately provide the full details of what he is now examining.” campaign chair John Podesta said in a statement. “We are confident this will not produce any conclusions different from the one the FBI reached in July.”